Flickr, bought by Yahoo in 2005, was one of the pioneers of the social Web. That site grew out of its founders' efforts to build an online game, and Tiny Speck's project was widely seen as the realization of that dream.

But its hauntingly lovely graphics and kindhearted gameplay failed to attract a meaningful audience. A key executive, Kakul Srivastava, who had worked with Butterfield at Yahoo as Flickr's general manager, left in January. (She is now running her own company, an app developer named Tomfoolery.)

The closure announcement said that Tiny Speck had failed to find a buyer willing to keep the Glitch game running, and that it was expensive to run. It also noted that the company had bet heavily on Adobe's Flash, a desktop-oriented Web animation technology increasingly viewed as dated and poorly adapted to mobile.

But Tiny Speck sounded an optimistic note that a future could be found for some of the complex technology used to keep the game's objects, characters, and actions in sync in real time:

Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, will continue. We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products.

If a new venture is born out of Tiny Speck's technologies, it would have an eerie parallel with Flickr, which grew out of a feature that let online game players post photos.